ALABAMA'S VINE AND OLIVE COLONY

MYTH AND FACT

In Vine and Olive Colony myth, dashing aristocrats struggle in vain to tame the wilderness, but the truth is just as compelling-and far more important to the American story.

Everybody is discouraged, Americans as well as French. Everybody wants to sell. The fever and deaths have caused this.

-Vine and Olive colonist Madame Victoire George (September 6, 1823)

THE STORY OF THE VINE AND OLIVE COLONY has captivated generations of Alabamians since it was first recounted by Albert Pickett in his 1851 history of Alabama's colorful beginnings. In 1817, the story goes, a group of exiled French military aristocrats loyal to the recently deposed Emperor Napoleon founded a Vine and Olive Colony on a vast tract of wilderness at the confluence of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior Rivers. Granted these lands by the United States Congress under the condition that they clear them and plant grapevines and olive trees, the French colonists set about their task with an abundance of Gallic joie de vivre, but without sufficient agricultural know-how or determination. For a time Marengo County shone as a center of sophistication and grace on the Alabama frontier, as the dashing French counts and their elegant ladies did their best to re-create the pleasures of Paris and Fontainebleau. Yet, more comfortable on a thundering battlefield or ballroom floor than behind a plow, they soon faltered in their pioneering endeavors. Although they did manage to plant some grapevines and olive trees (at least according to local lore still heard in Demopolis today), the unforgiving wilderness steadily wore down their will. Within a few years they had given up and returned to France, leaving their lands to more sturdy American pioneers who quickly succeeded where the scions of Old Europe had failed. Subsequent retellings have added new details, but have not changed the main lines of the story.

Like all legends, that of Vine and Olive contains a grain of truth ... but only a grain. In fact, only one "aristocrat," General Count Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes, ever settled in the colony. The son of a cloth merchant, Lefebvre-Desnouettes had risen through the ranks of the French Revolutionary army and owed his noble title to Napoleon, who had bestowed it upon him in 1808. Even with his newly minted title, this hardened career soldier from a middleclass background hardly made a convincing aristocrat. Only a few other Napoleonic officers-all of lower rank-settled in the colony, but they left Alabama after only short stays. Lefebvre-Desnouettes himself left in 1821 to return to France, only to drown in a shipwreck off the Irish coast. By 1830 not a single Napoleonic veteran was left. In reality, the majority of the colony's inhabitants were not soldiers and were not even from France at all, but were refugees from the French Caribbean island of St. Domingue. St. Domingue had once been the richest sugar colony in the world, the jewel of France's overseas empire. But its wealth rested on volatile foundations: the labor of five hundred thousand enslaved Africans who lived and died under one of the harshest slave regimes the world has ever known. Soon after the French Revolution broke out in 1789, they began an uprising of their own that left tens of thousands dead and ultimately resulted in the creation of the independent country of Haiti in 1804. White colonists and free people of color fled the blood-drenched island. Many came to the United States, especially to New Orleans and Philadelphia. It was in this latter city that the idea of the Vine and Olive Colony had its origins.

The prospect of establishing a French settlement in the American West was first broached in August 1816 in the pages of Philadelphia's leading French-language newspaper, the Abeille Américaine (The American Bee). Its editor, the multitalented silversmith and writer, JeanSimon Chaudron (who, after moving to the Vine and Olive Colony himself, would gain the title "The Blind Poet of the Canebrake"), eagerly embraced the notion. Over the next several months, he devoted the pages of his newspaper to promoting the project and calling for volunteers. By November a "Colonial Society" (later renamed the "Society for the Cultivation of the Vine and Olive") had been formed to make these dreams a reality. Some of the Society's most prominent members-the former deputies to the French Revolution's National Convention Joseph Lakanal, Jacques Gamier des Saintes, and Jean-Augustin Pénières-Delors-were dispatched to the Ohio Valley and beyond to scout for a suitable site for the settlement. At the same time, the society's vice-president, former U.S. Consul to Bordeaux William Lee, was directed to undertake an intensive lobbying effort aimed at convincing Congress to throw its support behind the project.

Both of these initiatives were successful. In January 1817 the society found an ideal location for the settlement on the banks of the Tombigbee River, in the territory General Andrew Jackson had recently conquered from the Creek and Choctaw Indians. At the same time, Lee's lobbying efforts had succeeded in winning the support of key power-brokers such as former President Thomas Jefferson, current President James Madison, secretary of State James Monroe, Speaker of the House Henry clay, and General Jackson himself. In February 1817 Congress began to consider an act "disposing of a tract of land to embrace four townships, on favorable terms to the emigrants, to enable them successfully to introduce the cultivation of the vine and olive, etc." After some heated debate in which Federalist opponents charged that such a grant would result not in the creation of sustainable American viticulture, but only in sordid land speculation, the measure was approved overwhelmingly. The bill was signed into law by President Madison on March 3, 1817, his last day in office. It allowed the French to choose for their settlement four contiguous townships (144 square miles or 92,000 acres) in the Greek Cession before these lands were offered to the general public. The Colonial Society was given a fourteen-year grace period before it had to plant a "reasonable" (although undefined) proportion of its lands with grapevines and olive trees and before it had to pay for its lands at the rock-bottom federal rate of two dollars per acre. Given the pace at which land values were rising in Alabama during the period 1817-19, the period of "Alabama Fever," and the generous fourteen-year grace period, Congress had effectively given the French a gift.